Chapter 269: Dislocation
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Adrenaline aside, Sam's mother was not good at combat. She was trying, certainly, Sam saw, but she just didn't have the training for it. No surprise, really. Pamela Manson was a socialite and housewife, nothing like, say, Maddie Fenton except in terms of her care for her child and her utter savagery when it came to keeping her safe.
Therefore, Sam was worried, and with all the ghosts and possessed humans coming at them, she really couldn't afford to be.
Typical Amity Park ghost fights were against single opponents, or perhaps a small band, if the primary ghost was charismatic or powerful. They lasted only for short periods of time, and Sam, Tucker, and Jazz – even Danny, to some degree – rarely had to outright beat a ghost, only wear it down until Danny could get it into the thermos.
Sure, there were invasions. Walker, Fright Knight, Undergrowth, Nocturne, and Pariah Dark stood out. But those were the exceptions, not the rule, and Danny was still generally the principal combatant. Sam and Tucker were backup. It was something that two (mostly) untrained, unpowered kids could keep up with. It was something they could grow into.
This fight was not like the ones Sam was used to. It wasn't over quickly, and Danny wasn't here. It wasn't even in the Ghost Zone, where she could leverage the insane physics. She had no time to rest between assaults. No allies to fall back on, except her mother, who, as mentioned, needed far more help than she could give.
Sam was sweating, breathing hard, her heart hammering. Her vision had taken on an odd tint, graying out around the edges. Something inside her chest burned. The plants around her weren't responding as quickly as they had in the first minutes of the battle. She was wearing down, being exhausted with sheer numbers. The concussion was also a problem.
They needed to get off this roof.
She was going to hate herself for leaving Dmitri. Seeing him there, under that woman's thrall, was like seeing Danny controlled by Freakshow. Only Dmitri had even less experience with the world than Danny. He was like a little kid, and… And Sam had to go. If Sojourn couldn't risk attacking without Dmitri hurting himself on that woman's orders, Sam didn't have a chance. She probably should have realized that earlier, saved herself precious effort and minutes, started towards the edge of the roof, looked for a service door, something.
But… Freakshow had traumatized Danny. Sam doubted he was over it, even now, so long after the fact. She doubted it was a thing he could get over. Even if he always said he didn't remember much about it.
So, she'd stayed, she'd fought. It wasn't the first time she'd made a bad decision under pressure. It probably wouldn't be the last.
They needed to get off the roof.
"Mom!" she shouted, straining to be heard over the creaking of wood, the static buzz and whines of ectoblasts, and the ringing in her ears. "This way!" She jerked her head to the side, too tired to raise her arms or her improvised club in anything but defense.
Pamela nodded back. Her, well, everything was askew, and that was so out of character for her mother that Sam couldn't help but smile for a moment. It probably wasn't even recognizable as a smile, given that even her face felt tired.
She should have known better. Distractions couldn't be afforded in a battle like this.
This wave of ghosts wasn't any heavier or better organized than the last several, it didn't have any more intelligence behind it, the ghosts weren't stronger, they didn't break through the newly grown branches of Sam's tree any faster than before, but it happened at just the wrong moment.
Sam's shoulder hit the main branch of the tree at an odd angle, wrenching it as she went down. The ghosts piled in, reaching out, and-
A body plummeted from the sky.
A very specific body.
Dan having a 'big damn heroes' moment just felt wrong. On so many levels.
Huh. Maybe she hadn't forgiven him as much as she'd tried to. For Danny.
(She maybe hadn't tried all that hard.)
(She could hold a grudge if she wanted.)
Her mother, who had been slightly behind Sam and therefore not as immediate a target for the ghosts, offered Sam a hand up. She seemed only slightly surprised at the rate at which Dan was tearing through the ghosts, but then, Pamela Manson was a citizen of Amity Park. She'd seen her fair share of ghost fights. She knew what a ghost like Danny could do.
Dan was, for better or worse, like Danny.
(Even if neither of them wanted to admit it.)
"What are we doing now?" asked Pamela in a very thin, worn voice.
"Off the roof," said Sam, clutching her back. The tree rustled its branches weakly, an echo of what Sam was currently feeling.
"Oi!" shouted Dan. "Have you seen Dmitri? Little moron ran off!"
"He's under mind control," said Sam. "That woman has him. She was up here somewhere, but she could have moved back downstairs."
"Of all the stupid, inconvenient…" He trailed off, muttering. Muttering, grabbing a ghost by the head, and flinging it away so hard it turned into a twinkle in the sky. Sam didn't know things even did that. Maybe it was because it was a ghost and therefore glowing.
Sam lead the way back through the branches, to where the tree had first made contact with the roof. "Here. We can climb down." There were enough branches, and the tree itself was at enough of an angle that it would be, if not easy, not impossibly difficult.
Pamela eyed the long drop skeptically.
"Come on, we don't have time to find the stairs."
"What if we're attacked on the way down?"
"I don't know," said Sam. She gestured at her arm, which was probably dislocated. "It isn't like I'll be able to do much fighting anyway."
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"Let me come back with you," said Danny. The main reason he hadn't just asked Clockwork to send the president and his men back immediately was so that he'd have the opportunity to convince the man. "I can fix this whole situation so fast. You won't need your military or anything." Not that a conventional military would do much good against ghosts.
"Things aren't that simple, Prince Phantom," said the president. Danny did his best not to make a face at the title. It was correct, after all.
"But it is. I mean," he said, changing tack, "you can just say that you let me in. Or, you don't have to say anything at all, to anyone. I can just go straight to the facility. No one would even have to know I was there, if you're worried about appearances or politics."
"And have no explanation for exactly where this second ghost army has gotten to?"
Danny pressed his lips together. To be quite frank, he didn't know what the president wanted, and the man's tone was awfully patronizing. At first, he'd thought the problem was that he didn't want to be seen receiving help, but now this seemed more like he was worried about public confidence, which Danny… He supposed he could understand that, but he didn't understand how the president could consider it more important than saving people.
He wanted to – No. He really shouldn't do that. That wasn't a thing he did. Wasn't a way he used his powers.
A chorus of save them, save them, save them echoed in his head. Or, rather, his core.
"Mr. President," he said. "I'm afraid this isn't a problem that will just go away, and the more you delay, the harder it will be to fix. This needs to be repaired now, before the perpetrators manage to hide."
The president donned a very put-upon expression. This was further exaggerated when Frostbite inserted a small tool into his ear.
"It has only been an hour. And is that really necessary?" He asked, pulling away from Frostbite.
"I don't want to send you back to your people with parasites, Mr. President," said Frostbite.
"Is… Parasites? Am I likely to have gotten parasites?"
"Not from here," said Frostbite, "but prison conditions do tend to breed them."
To say the president was dismayed by that piece of information would have been an understatement. He relented, letting Frostbite put the tool back in his ear.
"A half an hour is a huge amount of time in this kind of situation," said Danny. "Do you know how fast ghosts can fly? They could already be miles away. Or scattered all over the countryside."
"Would you even be able to apprehend Showenhower and his associates?" asked the president. There was a faint tinge of desperation to his words. "Given that he was controlling all those other ghosts. What's to say he won't do the same to you?"
"He won't. I have experience with him, I know how to counter him," said Danny. "I'll just take care of Freakshow and whoever he's with, then leave. It can be that simple."
"Prince Phantom, I can't be seen inviting a foreign army into our borders."
"It won't be an army! It'll just be me."
The president, who had been rather still before, getting a medical checkup and all that, outright froze.
"Just you?"
"You have to have seen the video of my stopping a missile from hitting Amity Park at this point," said Danny. "I know the Amity team brought it. I've fought armies before. Usually not single-handedly, but if all I have to do is take out a known keystone, it isn't that bad. And I'm more than willing to do it to get my friends back."
There was silence from the president.
"Wouldn't you insist on an American presence, if members of one of your embassies were kidnapped on foreign soil? In essence, that's all I'm asking for."
Wow. That actually sounded like a pretty good argument. Those statecraft lessons must have made a bigger impact than he'd thought. Either that, or he was getting used to talking like that after answering so many letters in 'prince mode.'
"It would just be me and Jazz, who you've already approved of going back. That's it."
The president sighed. "Alright," he said.
Danny, trying to be taken seriously as a prince, did not do a celebratory dance.
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The president watched the young ghost bounce in place in apparent happiness, or at least excitement. He just wished he could do the same – and, perhaps, go back to pretending that this was a totally emotionally mature individual, and not the literal ghost of a child.
This was going to just fine, he was sure.
God in heaven. What was he saying?
"I'll have to go without you, first. Make sure none of my people shoot at you. Now that would be a diplomatic incident." Hopefully someone in his staff had remembered more about ghost culture than him, and they could help him come up with a better solution to… whatever this was.
Phantom scowled. "This whole thing is a diplomatic incident."
"I think you getting shot at would make it worse," said Jasmine from beyond the privacy curtain. "Let's just have the humans go back, at first, and then we can smooth things over."
"But that will take forever, Jazz. We're operating within an unknown time constraint! And we're still missing Sam, Dmitri, Pamela, and Sojourn."
"But you want this to end in peace, don't you?"
"That's why I'm bothering with any of this!" said Phantom, spreading his hands with the kind of exasperation that very much belonged to a sibling dispute.
Jasmine pushed back the curtain.
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Jasmine Fenton was trending. She was trending everywhere.
Of course she was. She'd walked through an extradimensional portal into a media feeding frenzy carrying two swords and looking just battle-worn enough to be intriguing. The fact that everyone knew she was a princess only added fuel to the fire, never mind the prevailing (but sadly unconfirmed) rumor that she had personally rescued the president through near-superhuman feats.
There was also a rumor that she was a particularly well disguised ghost. Well, it was more of a conspiracy theory.
(Wes Weston, incidentally, despised this. If he hadn't had so much work for the embassy – they'd been accused of arranging the whole incident – he'd be on the internet refuting the ridiculous conspiracy theory. Well over a year of trying to convince people Fenton was Phantom, and no one listened to him like this. It was infuriating.)
(He was, in fact, considering looking into whether or not ghosts could curse people, and how one would go about finding out if they were cursed.)
(He did not pause to wonder if Jazz's liminality would indeed count as her being a ghost.)
(If he did, he'd have to wonder about his own, after all.)
Sword princess several websites called her.
Her picture was photoshopped into airbrushed beauty and back to something rougher half a dozen times in the first few hours, in a phenomenon that would have no doubt annoyed Jasmine, had she known about it. She wasn't trying to look pretty. She'd barely taken the time to get her more serious scrapes and bruises taken care of by the ghost doctors and pull her hair back.
To be fair, she wasn't all too pretty at the moment, either. Sure, she wasn't going to be falsely modest. She was conventionally attractive, not to mention young and white. Controversial, sure, but that didn't stop the kinds of people that did these things. But she was dirty, exhausted, and beaten.
But there was power in a girl, a teenager, standing next to the president of the United States and operating at the same level, and not as a token. Operating as a diplomat and warrior and—
And although that wasn't a completely new development, it hadn't been quite so obvious before, when she was working with Sojourn.
So.
There were a thousands of pictures of Jasmine (many with overlaid with jasmine flowers, for the aesthetic), all over the internet. And like most of the things on the internet, it was both glorious and a disaster.
Perhaps, then, it was a good thing Jasmine Fenton had no idea it was happening.
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Jazz crossed her arms. "You do realize the situation is developing as we speak? All Phantom needs is permission to act, so we can solve this problem, but if you leave it long enough for them to go to ground, we might never find them."
The president pinched the bridge of his nose as his cabinet stood by, somewhat aghast. "I do realize that, but…"
"But what?" snapped Jazz. He'd seemed ready to do it, but then he'd disappeared for a half hour, and come back as a brick wall.
"But," said the president, "there's a procedure to these things."
"There's a procedure for the prince of the unquiet dead asking to come into the country," said Jazz, skeptically.
"For foreign forces to come into the country," said the president. "You aren't even an ally."
Jazz wanted to throw something. Could she rally what was left of the embassy and do something? Tell Danny the tentative agreement with the president had fallen through? Tell him to come anyway?
"Miss Fenton," said an aide at the door, "your aunt says she has vital news. Mr. President, would it be alright if…?" The aide trailed off.
"Let her in," said the president. "I don't know what news she could possibly have, if she's been here the whole time, but we might as well add another thing…"
The aide waved to someone past the door, and Aunt Alicia walked in.
"I'm not sure how to say this," she said, "but your wife's sister is working with that Showenhower character."